Robert Colvile
@rcolvile
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Director of @CPSThinkTank, EIC of @CapX, Sunday columnist for @thetimes, author of 'The Great Acceleration'. Politics, policy and parenting.
London
Joined December 2008
Still early stages but I think I know who Time’s Person of the Year is going to be. Just a hunch.
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US: Stop the steal! March on the capitol!. UK: Thank you to all my fellow candidates for the civilised fashion in which we fought the election, and to everyone here at Borsetshire Leisure Centre.
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Today is climate strike day. Millions of people across the world, according to the organisers, will be marching to save the planet. But having dug into what they're actually marching for, I'm profoundly uneasy. So uneasy, in fact, that it's time for a THREAD.
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I have now been sent the Labour dossier on their claim to save the average household £6,700. Even by the standards of modern politics, it is impossible to stress how bloody shoddy these numbers are and how quickly they fall apart. Thread follows, with occasional swearing.
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I see Rishi has joined Liz in highlighting the scourge of solar panels on our precious farmland. We have 23 million acres of farmland. Even if we quintuple solar output (the govt's target), it would take up roughly 1/200th of it. Also you can usually still farm on the land!.
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Dear London taxi drivers, if you want to win your war with the 21st century, maybe stop using the phrase ‘Oh, you’re paying by card, are you?’ as though you’re being presented with mysterious spices from the East.
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If Bill Gates doesn’t win the Nobel, then there’s no bloody point to it. The work he has funded and co-funded on vaccine prep and deployment alone is going to save millions of lives, and potentially hundreds of millions.
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Maybe the reason why they're still not letting us play cricket is because the disease started in bats.
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RIP Wandsworth Council, champion of low taxes and ruthless efficiency, 1978-2022. You will be sorely missed, especially when my next council tax bill arrives.
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Find it hard to buy the personal liberty argument re refusing to wear a facemask given that the liberty being infringed is your liberty to infect other people with a potentially fatal disease, which surely has an impact on their own liberty, and indeed mortality.
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Hey remember how only 0.3% of non-doms were going to leave and it was going to raise loads of money?
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The Winter Fuel Payment is a classic example of the public spending ratchet. A Gordon Brown bung to *all pensioners* that became seen as a god-given right, even as pensioners steadily became the wealthiest cohort in the history of our country. Means-testing is absolutely right.
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I'm going to go with 'because he sat on the official commission on how we teach and remember the Holocaust, as one of Britain's most eloquent critics of antisemitism'.
Why does Michael Gove and his wife own a copy of a book by David Irving, one of the most notorious Holocaust deniers on earth.
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This will be overshadowed by other events but still important - Bercow to be found guilty of 21 counts of bullying by a parliamentary inquiry. Shame on all those who defended him purely because of his position on Brexit.
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At this time of turmoil for our nation, what a relief to have the magnificent clarity offered by Jeremy Corbyn. Hasn't read the withdrawal agreement, not sure how he'd vote in another referendum, doesn't really know what should happen. Statesmanlike. Leaderly.
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Whatever else you think of him, Boris is a historic figure. Changed the course of the nation in both 2016 and 2019. (And the memory of that election night and the destruction of Corbynism is one I will always treasure.).
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Some non-election news. In July, I lost my wife Andrea to liver disease. She was the kindest, cleverest, most brilliant person I ever knew. Today would have been her 41st birthday. (1/?)
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‘This National Service thing does sound like a good idea,’ says my mum, 85, living up to every demographic cliche.
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It's been eight years since Putin last decided he could just grab bits of Ukraine at will. Utterly bizarre that Germany in particular was perfectly happy to increase its energy dependence on him just a few weeks ago.
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This is just very weird. There hasn’t been a racist backlash against Sunak. And if the Brits were worried about women being in a position of power they got it out of their system about three PMs ago.
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The latest housing affordability statistics are out and it is impossible to overstate what a horrifying, generationally traumatising shitshow they are. Here is the situation in 1997 vs 2021
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I bloody love BBC Parliament. 'If a new Speaker is chosen and then doesn't get elected, would they be the shortest-serving ever?' 'Well there was a guy who was chosen and then the Archbishop of Canterbury declared him a heretic the next day, but that was in 1395. '.
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The vaccine passports debate is a perfect illustration of my new working theory: that the most important part of modern government, and its most important limitation, is database management. Please stick with me on this - it's much more interesting than it sounds. (1/?).
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If we're going to save the planet, we do need to unite behind the science. But that includes the science of economics. (End of rant.).
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Things that don’t get you expelled from the Labour Party: hosting IRA, Hamas, Hezbollah in parliament; sharing platforms with antisemites; picketing trial of Brighton Bomber; etc etc. Things that do get you expelled from the Labour Party: being Trevor Phillips.
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As the GB Energy Bill passes second reading, a quick reminder of how incredibly dodgy the maths behind Labour's energy policies is. (1/?).
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I failed to headline my tweet about this 'Orange is the New Blackmail' and therefore I hereby resign from journalism
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A point Boris keeps hammering away at. The EU wouldn’t accept having to follow our standards in order to trade with us, so why should we accept the reverse?.
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I've said again and again that solar and onshore wind are massively popular, and it's baffling that the govt thinks there's a great Nimby backlash waiting. Now, new polling from @Survation for @RenewableUK shows that, er, solar and onshore wind are massively popular.
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We called it one of the ‘great forgotten stories of neuroscience’ because everyone had forgotten it. @jk_rowling did not choose her pseudonym out of homophobia or insensitivity. She could not have known about this guy - who everyone called Robert Heath anyway, or just Bob. 2/2.
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£300 extra for pensioner households - why? Many pensioners are extremely wealthy. Why not means-test it? (Why not means-test all pensioner benefits?).
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I can’t believe this has to be said, but here we go. In 2013, @jk_rowling published her first book as Robert Galbraith. In 2016, I published this on Robert Galbraith Heath, a US psychiatrist who (among much else) tried to invent a gay cure. 1/2.
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Demand one: listen to medical and epidemiological experts not online activists. Demands two-five: see demand one.
We need to all unite around 5 demands the government must agree to implement during the coronavirus crisis. What should they be?.
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Turns out the whole system needs purging.
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Hearing the breakthrough in the talks came at 3.36am when David Frost threw up his hands and said: ‘You know what? It’s only fucking mackerel.’.
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From a friend flying in from the US: ‘If I get COVID, it's going to be from this mess of an immigration line in Heathrow I've been in over an hour now. Everyone packed together. Loads of people without masks and coughing around me. I am genuinely shocked at it all.’.
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Think it’s time for all of us - even those like me who muttered about deadweight cost - to accept that Eat Out to Help Out was a great idea from @RishiSunak. Stimulated hospitality sector while providing people with crucial reminder they could actually leave their homes. .
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What gives life meaning? Everyone says 'family'. The British are almost the only ones to add 'hobbies'.
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The NHS is 70 years old. The Tories have been running the country for 43 of those years. If they've got a secret plan to privatise it, it's not a very good one.
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This is like that NHS ranking that found it was world-leading except at treating people.
Our latest inspection of @metpoliceuk has been published today. We found that the force has improved its response to the public. But there are serious concerns around how it investigates crime and manages offenders and suspects. Read more🔽 .
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Counterintuitive tweet which will get no numbers at all: I went to Tesco. They had a wide range of produce in stock bar a few obvious essentials. (Loo roll, eggs, hand gel etc.) Everyone kept a good distance from each other. The queues at the checkout were small.
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Am not the first to say it but the Passport Office has become just incredibly efficient. The Amazon of government.
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First the Garrick, now the MCC. Poor Stephen seems to have an unfortunate habit of only noticing these institutions are utterly awful after decades of membership
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Still can't get over Burnham warning that third runway is a model for 'an ever overheating UK economy'. I'd be absolutely delighted if the economy came even remotely close to overheating, let alone on a permanent basis. Just some flickers of warmth would be nice.
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One of the key demands of @GretaThunberg et al is that people respect the science, and unite behind it. I completely agree. But the manifesto for the climate strike movement isn't just unscientific, but actively anti-science - and hugely dangerous as a result.
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Sorry kids, you’ll have to fend for yourselves today, Daddy’s just sitting on Twitter watching Putin have the worst day of his life.
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Another classic from the Civil Service job board. Would you like to lead trade negotiations between Switzerland and the UK? Do you have an expert knowledge of global trade and diplomacy? Would you like to be paid many times less than those skills are worth?
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This is going to sound colossally nerdy, but the act of voting in the UK is really rather wonderful. Polite, civic, slightly shabby. Pencils and paper, a few student volunteers, the church hall awkwardly repurposed. Ritual only slightly disrupted by awkward fumbling for photo ID.
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Getting a tiny, tiny fraction in my mentions of what @jk_rowling goes through (after she replied to an old tweet of mine defending her choice of soubriquet) and my god how is she still on this hellsite.
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‘No business can survive Reeves’s 20 per cent tax grab. It will be the death of entrepreneurship.’ James Dyson on how the Budget will kill family businesses.
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‘This Budget is very unfair to pensioners, who will merely get an 8.5% rise in the state pension on top of the 10.1% rise last year’ - an actual argument that actual people actually seem to be making.
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The triple lock is a wasteful, unfair and outdated policy. So why the hysteria when politicians even gesture towards questioning it? Thread, with charts and data and stuff. (1/?).
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This part, Nadine.
Which part of the bill legislates for hurt feelings, Kemi?.
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Average growth rate over next few years, according to OBR: 1.58%. We are absolutely fucked.
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Fox News saying this is the first time anything like this has happened since the British burned down the Capitol in 1814. Nice to get a mention I guess.
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Question for the conspiracy theorists: what in anything the government has said or done has given you the impression that it has the capability, let alone the desire, to pull off your particular batshit idea about lockdowns, masks, vaccines and/or liberties?.
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In my book, I diagnosed what I called 'utopian authoritarianism' - the idea that the only way to save the planet is for people on the left to command others, in the developed and developing world, to live poorer, meaner lives
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Labour says it will save every family £6,700 a year by giving them free stuff. There are 19.1 million families in Britain. That's £128 billion of free stuff. Labour are promising to raise taxes by £83 billion. And to spend at least £70 billion of that on other stuff. Hmmm.
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It's easy for the SNP to be incredibly pro-migration because migrants don't really want to go to Scotland.
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Voted and vaccinated within half an hour. Not such a bad country, this.
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Wow! Just got an email from the govt. Apparently I’ve been selected for isolation at an exclusive five-star spa-bunker, since my superior genetic stock will be needed to repopulate the nation in The Times to Come. Just have to send my bank details and PIN so they know it’s me.
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Whatever else you say about @MattHancock, he was one of the key voices pushing vaccines as the way out of this at a time when that was very far from the consensus. He can be extremely proud of that.
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Congratulations to @BootstrapCook on getting her own @ONS index - food inflation on the lowest-cost items in supermarkets.
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Others have made this point but QALYs (which the QC gets wrong) are literally how you measure the merit of all public health interventions, whether to approve certain drugs etc. This whole inquiry increasingly feels like arts students being asked to write a science thesis.
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Decided to look up which sinister multinational actually owns Yorkshire Tea. Turns out, Taylors of Harrogate was bought up back in 1962. By, er, the company that runs Bettys tea rooms. Hence the most delightfully English statement of accounts you'll ever read
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Today would have been my wife's birthday, which made it all more surprising/utterly unexpected for this to happen last night during what I thought would be a speech to @CPSThinkTank about free trade (and, as it turned out, Peppa Pig as an exemplar thereof) (1/?)
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A reader gets in touch to point out that the £2.6 trillion liability for public sector pensions, cited in my column, comes to almost £40k for every man, woman and child in the country. But if you divide it by the number of people actually paying income tax, it's over £70k.
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Tweeted this yesterday and then a load of people pointed out they do have a problem with the gifts themselves, because MPs legislated/regulated to ban huge swathes of workers like them from accepting such gifts, due to the risk of corruption. Which is a fair point.
Thinking about the freebies issue, the really problematic thing (personal opinion) isn't the gifts themselves, but the role of Lord Alli as a sort of human cashpoint for the cabinet/shadow cabinet. (1/?).
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Just to check, are private nurseries going to be seized/expropriated too? Or is there some kind of arbitrary age limit at which it becomes illegal to educate your children at an establishment not controlled and funded by the state?.
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The ideas behind the climate strike movement are fundamentally illiberal. They are fundamentally misguided. And they just won't work.
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The Left: People really are eager to pay more taxes, if it's for a good cause. The French:
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‘Where are you going to, little brown Mouse? Come and have tea in my underground house. ’. ‘It’s terribly kind of you, Fox, but no. I’m meeting a friend in a kimono.’.
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Really admire Owen for this brave argument that people who supported crankish, dangerous extremists being elected to the country's highest office should be ashamed of their actions
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A year ago, I lost my wife Andrea. I've written for @thesundaytimes on the awful year that followed (1/3)
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Who would have guessed that a tougher policy on asylum seekers and illegal immigrants would be unpopular on Twitter and popular with voters?.
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The problem with this generation is that they fritter all their money away on Rolex watches. If they just cut down on these unnecessary fripperies they’d easily be able to afford a winter fuel payment.
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'[The tribunal] rightly found that Next could have afforded to pay a higher rate but chose not to and that the reason for that was purely financial.' THAT IS HOW RUNNING A COMPANY WORKS YOU CLOTH-BRAINED MUPPET.
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To all those retweeting @Peston etc, the shortage of reagents is not due to the chemical industry - they are made by a very few specialised life sciences firms in very few places, one of which is Germany. I made this mistake yesterday but have at least tried to correct it.
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As a Tory, I'm approaching tonight in the same spirit as watching 'Titanic'. You know what's going to happen, the drama is seeing who survives.
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This is utterly abominable. A very modern betrayal of Tube's long history of exemplary visual design.
New Tube roundel unveiled by @SadiqKhan and TfL commissioner Andy Lord at Baker Street station to mark the 160th anniversary of the London Underground
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Hey NYT wait till you hear about this thing called Air Force One it will blow your frickin’ mind.
Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, which will involve elaborate processions, vigils and rituals, will be paid for by British taxpayers as they deal with soaring energy prices and high inflation. The British government has not yet said how much it will cost.
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I love @MarinaHyde’s stuff but this guy almost died of Covid, he’s got a new baby and he’s running the damn country. So, yes, he gets to take a holiday.
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Um I’ve been offline so didn’t realise this was happening but I do not think Owen was mocking what happened to me. Thanks to everyone who took offence on my behalf but can we all calm down?.
The reason I'm currently trending is because a group of British journalists decided to mock the names of my friends at Novara. One of them suffered a horrible personal tragedy, which I knew nothing about, in 2019, and obviously I was not, in any way, mocking this horror.
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SOME PERSONAL NEWS: Last year, I lost my wife Andrea to a liver disease called autoimmune hepatitis. It’s one of those conditions that’s rare enough to be significantly underfunded, but common enough to kill thousands and blight the lives of very many more. (1/?).
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Pretty striking - and damning - findings on the BBC's Middle East coverage
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Can’t believe Politico’s list of Westminster power couples missed out Jolyon and his reflection.
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Counterpoint: this is a really lovely idea if it can be made to work, and the Tories need to stop opposing literally everything Labour proposes just because Labour proposes it
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A bit depressing that this is considered a story. It's a relatively small amount, and a fairly obvious thing to help diplomats with given the fact we are, y'know, sending them to foreign countries
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Whisper it but maybe those behavioural insights guys had a point about lockdown fatigue.
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You could labour for a thousand years and never come up with a tweet so exquisitely pompous. Bravissimo.
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If I were in CCHQ, my next PPB (and every other PPB) would just be this video
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